It may not be released for another month, but Julian Fellowes’s adaptation of
William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is already provoking
debate.

It has been billed as a traditional adaptation of the classic love story. The latest version of Romeo and Juliet is not only filmed in Verona, Italy, the play’s original location, and set at the time it was written, but has also been scripted by Julian Fellowes, renowned for his period dramas.

And there’s the rub, as the original author might have said. Before it has even been released, the film is attracting criticism from Shakespeare scholars, who have accused Fellowes of altering the Bard’s work to such an extent that “little to none” of it is used.

Excerpts released to promote the film have been analysed by academics from two leading institutes dedicated to study of the playwright and both have reached similar conclusions. They found that Fellowes simplified lines, invented new ones and reconstructed phrases.

And while the experts say there is nothing wrong with adapting the Bard’s work, they expressed concern that because the play was being promoted as being close to the original, and Fellowes’s script still sounded “Shakespearean”, viewers could be misled into thinking they were hearing the original words.

In the credits for the publicity trailers, the film is described as being “From the greatest playwright ever known”.

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Caitlin Griffin, of the Folger Shakespeare Library – which houses the world’s largest collection of the playwright’s works – said: “While the language still sounds lofty, they’re not Shakespeare’s word choices – and that’s a big deal.

"Fellowes’s adaptation, while poetic and set in the period of Shakespeare’s play, is not using Shakespeare’s language. The advertising hasn’t been very clear on this fact.

“Adaptation is a fine thing – it can illuminate the play in ways we never expected. [But] I honestly cannot see the point of an adaptation in which little to none of the original text is used and it’s set in an all-too-familiar setting.”

She added: “Every reader, scholar, performer, and director brings their own perspective to Shakespeare’s original text and gives their own meaning to it. It’s not that Fellowes loses Shakespeare’s meaning, but rather that it’s Fellowes’s meaning and not Shakespeare’s that will be playing out in this film.”

Researchers from the library, based in Washington DC, compared two trailers for the film, which will be released on Oct 11, with Shakespeare’s first and second “quartos” – the earliest existing editions of his works, published in 1597 and 1599. They found that many lines were almost unrecognisable from the original. Others were completely new.

In one scene in the film, Romeo, played by Douglas Booth, says: “Juliet, if your heart like mine is full, then tell the joy that awaits us this night,” which is nowhere to be found in either quarto.

Later, shortly after Romeo has killed Tybalt, he says: “What have I done but murdered my tomorrow?” which is also not an original line.

A second comparison has been conducted by Prof Michael Dobson, the director of the Shakespeare Institute, in Stratford, part of the University of Birmingham.

He said: “I think it is interesting that there is a trend at the moment to replace some of the bits of difficult vocabulary in Shakespeare to make it clearer and that is clearly what Fellowes has done with this script though some of it sounds a little bit clunky in the trailer.”

Fellowes’s is the latest in a line of adaptations of the story of star-crossed lovers, and follows Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 classic, narrated by Laurence Olivier, and Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 update, which starred Leonardo Di Caprio as Romeo. Both versions stuck closely to Shakespeare’s dialogue – far more so than the trailers suggest Fellowes’s film does.

In an attempt to be as faithful as possible to the original play, producers of the latest version cast Hailee Steinfeld, who was 15 at the time of filming – about the age Shakespeare intended Juliet to be. They have also used traditional costumes and sets.

Fellowes has said he has tried to rewrite Shakespeare for a “new generation” in the project, which also stars Damian Lewis the Homeland actor, as Lord Capulet.

Last night, Fellowes, who was made a Conservative peer in 2011, said he did not want to get into a “slanging match”. He said: “People are perfectly entitled to say whatever they wish, good luck to them, say I.”

It is not the first time Fellowes’s work has dismayed experts.

Viewers of last year’s Titanic television series were keen to point out what they claimed were errors and historical inaccuracies.

Even the Edwardian Downton Abbey came under fire for its use of modern words and phrases, including “get knotted” and “get shafted”, both said to have originated in the 1960s.